“The irony is that only western culture allows dissent against culture and the acceptance of other ideas… yet western culture has the most dissenters.”
Dr. Craig S. Wright, Linkedin post
From a cybernetics view, a culture is a complex system that relies on both a base Unity and an active Requisite Variety to absorb (to deal with) the environment.
The Western culture’s base unity is Truth, while the Eastern culture’s base unity is Order.
For this reason, Western culture is more vulnerable to untruth (lies) than Eastern culture, while Eastern culture is more vulnerable to disorder (chaos) than Western culture.
On the other hand, the Western culture is more capable of generating a Requisite Variety than the Eastern culture to absorb (to cope with) a change in environment.
The above is true both in the greater society settings and smaller organizations.
By “vulnerable,” I do not mean that Western culture is more likely to generate lies, or that Eastern culture is more likely to generate chaos. I refer to the effect, not the cause, in that when there is prevailing untrue information, the untruth tends to cause more harm to the Western culture than to the Eastern culture because the untruth attacks the base Unity of Western culture, but to a large degree not that of the Eastern culture.
Likewise, when there is a chaotic condition, the disorder tends to cause more harm to the Eastern culture than to the Western culture because the disorder attacks the base Unity of the Eastern culture, but to a large degree, not that of the Western culture.
I’m not setting this forth as a moral judgment but merely a statement of an objective fact. As to the moral aspect, a person’s judgment is determined by the person’s values and beliefs.
I choose Truth because I believe that, ultimately, there will be no Order without Truth. But I do understand why others anchor their values on a different base, namely Order. I see complacency with untruth as a systemic ‘bug’, but they see tolerance with untruth as a pragmatic ‘feature’; I see no ultimate value in temporal order, but they say no value is ultimate because they believe all values are relative.
I also prefer Truth for a practical reason. A system that has Truth as its base Unity tends to be more robust and productive long-term because it can generate a more adequate Requisite Variety to face challenges in reality and solve emerging problems.
Those who understand the above fundamental differences between cultures will understand why some Western societies are committing suicide by promoting untruth that seemingly yields a temporarily desirable order and why some Eastern societies can go so deeply dug into a state that has no support for truth yet is not collapsing (like China’s “zero COVID” policy).
But on the other hand, if (a big if) the Western culture is truthful to its core values, it is more likely that real long-term solutions will come from the West than from the East.
The Truth itself will ultimately triumph. But may the truth culture survive as well.
Truth and Bitcoin
The above also explains why BTC, a severely altered (castrated) version of Bitcoin, can go so deeply dug in with its “small block” policy and is able to sustain for so long and reach such a high level.
Like the pandemic reactions, the cryptocurrency phenomenon is both a result and a witness of the degradation of the truth in culture.
While Bitcoin was invented by a polymath with staunch beliefs in classical Western culture and values, the philosophy of BTC is a betrayal of the same.
For the same reason, the real Bitcoin (BSV) is vulnerable to untruth and can only survive with the truth.